For the dog days of August, we’ve got several shows that turn away from grand artistic gestures toward the intimate, personal, and everyday. Lisson showcases Spencer Finch’s torn-envelope interventions, bits of painted and collaged wonder. Textiles as Monument at the Fowler Museum features three artists who use soft materials to memorialize those excluded from mainstream historical recognition. A show honoring the longstanding, recently demolished Echo Park restaurant Taix tries to capture its eccentric charm as a home for neighborhood regulars and Gen-Z bohemians alike. And a show at Roberts Projects focused on the garment, jewelry, and costume design of the late assemblage art pioneer Betye Saar shines a light on this important but overlooked aspect of her oeuvre.
Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye SaarÂ
Roberts Projects, 442 South La Brea Avenue, Hancock Park, Los Angeles
Through August 22
Betye Saar, who passed away last week at the age of 99, was a pioneering figure in LA assemblage, crafting astute juxtapositions of found objects that celebrated Black and female representation with wit, humor, and biting social critique. Let’s Get it On focuses on a lesser-known part of her practice: her costume design. The show includes more than 200 garments, photographs, and drawings spanning the 1950s through the 1970s. Among them are her costume designs for productions at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural performing arts space formed after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, as well as clothes she made for her daughters to wear at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire at the Paramount Ranch in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Based heavily on archival research, the exhibition adds a crucial puzzle piece to Saar’s extensive legacy.
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